The E.K. Shriver Center for Mental Retardation promotes research to understand the chemical and genetic causes of mental retardation and other developmental disabilities. The lipids, carbohydrates, proteins, and their conjugates in normal brain and in association with metabolic abnormalities are being characterized. These studies involve unraveling the normal processes in development so that environmental and genetic factors leading to retardation of development and to other neurological disorders can be identified and understood. This requisite progression in analysis and the increasingly detailed elucidation of changes in brain chemistry and structure during development demand that all of our studies simultaneously be more quantitative and multi-dimensional. We have always relied on state-of-the-art equipment for densitometry and morphological tracings, which now has been supplanted by a new generation of technology and applications. Our research efforts increasingly are dependent on the ability to analyze images, quantitative data, and the three-dimensional structures of the developing brain efficiently. To update and expand our facilities for analyzing the diverse data in these studies, we request funds to purchase equipment for data reduction and imaging that will maximize "off-the-shelf" data/image processing at the E.K. Shriver Center. The equipment requested is configured as three workstations that can be used simultaneously for different purposes. The Visage 2000TM (Bio-Image) allows gel/blot analyses to proceed uninterrupted and independently from morphological analyses conducted on IBAS/VIDASTM (Zeiss/Kontron) workstations. The IBAS/VIDAS workstations are designed to allow the collection of microscopic images on one station while still allowing either the collection of microscopic images on one station while still allowing either the collection of full secretion or autoradiographic images from a Macroscope TM (Leitz/Wild) or the analysis of previously stored data on the other station. The complete system provides an array of methods for image enhancements, direct quantitative comparisons of separate images from the same or different experiments, and the ability for computer-assisted visualization to reveal features and relationships that do not appear when one relies on non- quantitative comparisons and on memory. The equipment requested will be utilized intensively to take advantage of the vast improvements now available for molecular and developmental analyses of chemical, genetic, and morphological data.